greasers and preps and hippies and straights and radicals and sucks

I tell you the first thing that is going to happen when the federal government disappears in a puff of smoke, we in Illinois are going to raise a mighty army and conquer Michigan. Oh I’m sorry, we are going to free the proud, freedom-loving Michiganders from their despotic government, and they will strew our path with tulips. Oh I suppose there will be some soreheads among them, and we might be stretched a bit thin after we conquer the Hoosiers along the way, but maybe we can make some deal with the Chinese to help us out in exchange for say Indianapolis. But we will spare Beaglesonia to make it an Illinoisia park where people can go to see the last remaining sorehead mutter his rant as he drives his tractor around and shoots Bambi, followed by his gay male dog, to which, of course, he will be married.

On a slightly more serious side, the only thing that makes you suck/radicals love your state government is that it’s not the federal government, and without the feds you will be itching to shutdown your state government, and after that will come the county and then the city and then the book club, and then we will all become Sonians, like Beaglesonians, and UncleKenSonians and so on, but I guess that would make you happier than Bambi seeing you stumble and shoot yourself in the nuts, so maybe you win after all. But that poor gay dog is going to be lonely.

So brown noses at Gage Park were kids who got pretty good grades and behaved and went in for that rah rah stuff, and I think you ROTC types were suspect of that sort of thing too. So would a suck at the mill be someone who would be described as a company man? What would be a radical? Did you have hippie types there? Was there any dope smoking or other drugs going on? Were there some comsymps? Or were they just people who were generally negative or talked against the company?

Strikes me that at Gage Park we had the rah rahs, and the greasers. I always sort of wanted to be like a greaser. Me and Woody and some of our pals would hang out on street corners and smoke cigarettes and try and look tough, though of course we weren’t tough at all. The rah rah types were sometimes called college preps, and sure enough, when I got to college there were nothing but prep types. There were no greasers. I remember in study hall sometimes kids in the back of the room would Moo, or make various animal noises, but in college lectures nobody did that. Later on the hippies appeared, and we called the non hippies, straights, not that that had anything to do with sexual orientation, it just meant they weren’t hippies.

Well maybe we need to return to our high school days to sort this all out.